Ben Goldacre summarises some very compelling research on antioxidant vitamin pills. They make people who take them more likely to do harmful things to themselves. Don’t take them.
Ben Goldacre summarises some very compelling research on antioxidant vitamin pills. They make people who take them more likely to do harmful things to themselves. Don’t take them.
Ooh, dubious science as all these things are. I do agree that there is a psychological component of ‘I’m doing something healthy so can relax about my unhealthy stuff’ but he has not taken into account the time factor – which is that if you persist in being healthy you then become motivated to cut out the other stuff. In essence, this article is being used to belittle many peoples’ starting point from a study of a few months.
Second point. The vitamin pills were dummies. Taking vitamins and supplements such as omega 3 for a period does actually result in more energy and wellbeing and again creates a positive spiral. He’s entirely missed the real life point which is that measurable benefits do accrue.
Conclusion. Appalling science and he’s not even put himself in the real-life ballpark. This study, replicated with real vitamin pills and followed over the course of say 2 years, including general practical lifestyle and wellbeing questions, not just the ‘thinking scales’, would interest me. As it stands, a waste of time and funding.
One last (well, er, no promises mind you) point has occurred to me. A group of test subjects (presumably paid) do not have anything like the same motivation as people who have made a choice to go out and buy vitamins with the express intention of improving their health. Nor would they necessarily stick to the one-a-day regime. I find it endlessly amazing that the media reports this kind of study almost daily, and when you look into them they’re all full of the same kinds of holes. Confusing the general populace and not even rigorously examined.. this kind of conclusion drawn from this kind of research paper is a real issue as far as I’m concerned.
There is a stereotypical view of scientists as ‘absent-minded professors’ and the lack of realism in studies like this does make me think a good dose of common sense wouldn’t go amiss in the lab – when you think science is popularly set against all that supposedly fuzzy humanity it’s ironic that everyday sense would provide a more appropriate and focused structure for a study.
haven’t had a half-hour rant for ages – thanks Tom! 🙂
Umm. Not sure where to start, but I’m delighted you had a good rant. 😉 I always find them very therapeutic. I can pretty well guarantee one from the Today programme or Kay Burley.
The science looks pretty reasonable to me: start with a small (and as you say, potentially unrepresentative) sample and then expand the group to be more representative once you see an effect. The main issue with the initial study is whether they are creating the effect (the statistical likelihood of smoking while filling the form). I’m not sure they were, in that the test subjects were all smokers.
On dummies: the placebo effect is very strong, so there could be wellbeing effects from taking any supplements. The problem is that the Cochrane study (the gold standard in filtering all existing trials) mentioned has looked at 200,000 people taking vitamin supplements and found that they don’t have a positive effect in prolonging life. I’ve not read what they say about the quality of that same or shorter life span.
In terms of time, the Cochrane study does have the time factor in it, and the Taiwanese research was extended to cover broader health activities over time rather than the smoking while filling in a form.
On intention, the Cochrane covers paid and unpaid subjects, but yes, willpower could well be a factor in success. I’m not sure what the current work on smoking says.
So overall, I thought there was some truth in there, hence posting it. Of course it is post-facto rationalisation of why I hardly ever take pills for anything, but we are all allowed our biases, no?
I’d thought it was well-established that vitamin supplements (particularly the Bs, magnesium and omega 3s) improved wellbeing.
How do you manage to paragraph space within comments? Mine just goes into the next comment! To continue, I have to take contention with this being reasonable science. When i was studying psychology I had this very debate with my philosophy tutor: I was very keen on defending the science of psychological studies and statistically-based samples because frankly it was all there was. I remember saying ‘It’s at the cutting edge of science’ and he said ‘That’s no good when all you have is a plastic serrated knife to do the cutting with’ and over time I’ve come to agree with him.
I accept the invulnerability effect is likely: it’s part of human nature. However, studies like this are the cause of an awful lot of contradictory information mainly because they seek to isolate a part of the whole, it being practically impossible to tease out every strand of the whole. That’s fine as long as they don’t draw large real-life conclusions as their headlines. A conclusion that said ‘taking vitamin pills may increase your sense of invulnerability: be aware’ would be more modest and appropriate to the limitations of this kind of paradigm.
On the same grounds I think it’s equally silly to broadcast ‘Vitamin pills will prolong your life’ or ‘Cleaning products cause cancer’: when you look at the arrays of studies on all of this kind of thing they are inevitably contradictory and confusing to the customer and this kind of confident headline conclusion is nothing more or less than blagging 🙂
Personally I’d say the best test of vitamin pills would be personal experimentation. I’m a Westerner and I feel a lot better with an omega 3 supplement, magnesium supplements and B vitamins. It’s a measurable change in my wellbeing and my thoughts have nothing to do with it. Any attitude such as ‘I defend taking vitamins’ or ‘I don’t do pills’ is simply that, a personal attitude, and probably not that worth spending time with: it’s nothing more or less than the same kind of thought that the Adolescent Invulnerability Scale measures.
Losing those kind of thoughts.. now that’s a good game. Two thousand years of unbroken tradition has already created a science of human nature and it has the added practical benefit of collapsing blocks such as the one so painstakingly isolated above.
Which brings me to my final point – the closed nature of these kind of pronouncements. People do listen to this kind of thing because they want flat answers, something to go by, some kind of rule. Putting a flat statement and conclusion out there only feeds this kind of ‘shutdown’ thinking where people make intellectual decisions. For instance, someone previously might have thought ‘I shall take a daily vitamin pill for my health because they say it’s good for me.’ Now they might say ‘Oh, I’ll stop taking it then because this article says it will imcrease my risk-taking behaviours. And I should stop smoking’. In every instance, that person has given their power of decision to a headline when they could have been learning to listen to their own bodies. To me that’s a scary invulnerability block right there, and demonstrates a real lack of self-care. Though I accept I’m going against the ‘normal’ grain in making that statement, my personal experience and experiments have led me to realise dropping out of that kind of thinking is more beneficial for my sense of wellbeing than a vitamin pill could ever be 🙂
I completely agree with the final point: you have to listen to your body (so long as you are eating a healthy diet). If it works for you, indeed, it works for you.
My main problem with supplements is that few if any of the “supplements” have any clear positive effect on us (search for any of vitamins, magnesium etc at http://www.cochrane.org to see summaries of analysis of all the extant studies). The new research makes this lack of effect worse as it can increase harmful behaviour.
If supplements, etc, were marketed like alcohol: “makes some people feel better, isn’t really much good for your health”, I’d have no problem with them.
I once got bloodtested and was told where my levels were low and that worked well. If I’d taken a regular one-a-day I wouldn’t have got to that point of depletion.
i think our approaches are very different :))